No one expects the Vortex of Chaos. It's ice on the sidewalk three days before Christmas, the driver who knocks the door off your SUV, the surgery that dims your voice, the cancer treatments that leave your brain muddled for months. But like the accretion ring surrounding a black hole, the Vortex of Chaos is also the neon sign that says you're still in business, that you haven't given up, that you're not willing to take it lying down.
Chaos is Life.

Donnerstag, Juli 21, 2016

That Thing You Never Want to Do

That thing you never want to do on a lace project: I had to frog three rows of knitting this morning.

I am working from two charts. There is a side chart that I knit at the beginning and end of each row, and then the big middle section. Last night I suddenly discovered I was on the wrong chart row when I got to the side chart at the end of a row.

I did all the things you do. I counted stitches. I tinked back two rows (also not something you want to do in a lace project). I repeated a chart row to get back on. It looked horrible. I wanted to stay up all night and figure out what was wrong. But you know how that goes. If what you're doing isn't working, doing more of it isn't going to suddenly start working better. It took all my mental fortitude to put it away.

Sometime during the night I realized that I must have done that thing where you pick up your knitting in the middle of a row and forget which way you were knitting. Sure enough, when I counted rows I discovered that I had two extra rows on the left side.

So I bit the bullet and pulled the needle out. Very carefully.

I know, right?

I had to gingerly pull out three rows. Sure enough, there was a backtracky bit on the left side. I spent half an hour getting all the stitches back on. Then I read through the whole row to see if there was any damage. I had to redo a couple of nupps and a k 2 tog, but that was all.

I put it away. I'm not ready to look at it again for a while.

In case you're curious, the nupps are the little bobble-looking things. Here is a video of Nancy Bush demonstrating the technique (she starts the nupp at 1:30). She talks a little bit about Estonian knitting as well. The pattern I'm knitting, Crown Prince Shawl, is from the book she mentions at the end of the video, Knitted Lace of Estonia.

I also want to put in a plug for KnitCompanion, the app I use on my iPad to follow knitting charts. If I had been working from a paper chart and marking the finished rows with a highlighter like I used to do, it would have been much harder to indicate where I had to back up three rows. KnitCompanion is available for iDevices now, and will be released for Android shortly.